Category Archives: International

S. Frederick Starr – Lost Enlightenment: Central Asia’s Golden Age from the Arab Conquest to Tamerlane

It’s fairly well known that the Islamic world preserved classical texts during the dark interlude between Rome and the Renaissance. Plato’s dialogues, Aristotle’s taxonomies, and Galen’s medicine owe their survival to careful Islamic caretakers. It’s also fairly well known that Islamic scholars during this period made important original contributions to math (algebra is an Arabic word), astronomy, philosophy, and medicine. Of course, the same movement also gave us the word “gibberish” from the name of the scholar Jabir ibn Hayyan, who was as indecipherable in his time as he is in ours. But then, few things in the world are purely good or bad.

Starr has put together a superb intellectual history of the Arabic Enlightenment. He doesn’t quite give literature or the arts their due, but that was intentional. Nor is this a larger survey history of the Arab world during its golden age. Starr instead prefers to focus on philosophy, science, and medicine, and covers them thoroughly, while also paying some attention to art and architecture. He also brings the time’s leading personalities to life. Ibn Sina (b. 980), better known in English as Avicenna, for example, comes across as brilliant, and well aware of it. Starr give him a thorough biographical treatment of both his accomplishments and his personal life. Someone who was previously little more than a name I associated with a period in history became a person with likes and dislike, triumphs, pathos, and flaws.

Other figures get similar treatment, and Starr also tells the story of larger movements, such as Sufism, which came to prominence in Iran’s Safavid dynasty and focused on more ritual and mystic elements. Starr also introduces the reader to the heights of Baghdad’s cultural accomplishments, to the Seljuk Turks on the Arabic world’s western periphery, the terrors of Genghis Khan and his descendants, as well as the economic and intellectual contacts and exchange they made possible

Starr finally carries the story forward well into the 15^th century, up to the conqueror Timur (Tamerlane, d. 1405)’s descendants. Most prominent among these was his grandson Ulugh Beg, known as the Astronomer King, who was an accomplished scientist as well as a king.

This is a book I wish I had read years ago. Despite intentionally leaving out major aspects of culture and history, it is wide-ranging. It accessibly covers people, movements, events, and accomplishments that are still largely unknown to a Western audience, including this reader. And it satisfies my economist’s interest in interconnectedness, openness, exchange, and how culture can help or hinder prosperity. It pairs well with Justin Marozzi’s biography Tamerlane: Sword of Islam, Conqueror of the World, which I read around the same time.

Andrew J. Newman – Safavid Iran: Rebirth of a Persian Empire

The Safavid dynasty was one of the most liberal periods in Iranian history. Iran, of course, was not a nation-state in today’s sense of the term until the 20^th century. Safavid territory also included Baghdad and ranged up north into Afghanistan, several of the steppe countries and parts of Georgia, including Tiflis (now Tblisi), and ranged east almost as far east as Bukhara. It lasted from about 1510 to 1722, with a few dying embers lasting until 1736, a little bit like post-Louis XVI Bourbons.

For context, the Safavid dynasty ranged roughly from just before Europe’s Reformation and post-Columbian exploration age through the Scientific Revolution and the early Enlightenment. It began roughly a century after Tamerlane conquered most western and northern Asia. China’s Ming dynasty reached its peak and was overthrown during the Safavid era. The most famous Safavid monarch was Abbas I (reigned 1588-1629, roughly contemporaneous with Shakespeare, the second half of Elizabeth I’s reign, and her successor James I). But the generations before and after Abbas I were also comparatively liberal. One of the few opinions Newman ventures is that the Safavids were not a one-hit wonder with Abbas I as the dynasty’s only notable head.

The regime’s official religion was Twelver Shi’ism, which was an important development in Islamic history. But by the standards of their time, the Safavids were highly tolerant of both other kinds of Islam and non-Islamic religions. They compared favorably to both the Europeans of their time and the Iranian government in ours.

Art, architecture, poetry, and literature thrived, both in court and among regular people. Despite ongoing tensions with the Ottomans to the East and limited direct ties to Europe, an openness to trade also made Safavid territories prosperous enough where high art and exotic goods were affordable even to the middle class; even in Europe such things as single-page prints were still mostly the province of the wealthy. At the same time, the Safavid Dynasty was founded on military power, survived by the sword, and ultimately died by it. Its liberalism was in comparative, not economic terms. It is a complex, multifacted period, and was interconnected with what was going on in Europe, Turkey, Russia, India, and China.

Newman’s book is drily written, focusing heavily on kings and battles, and names and dates. If the reader enters with some knowledge of world history from 1500-1700, and a willingness to Google new names, places, and terms, they can tease more insights out of Newman’s narrow and literal focus. His grayscale portrait could have used some color. Unfortunately, English-language histories of the period are hard to come by, so Newman it is. Readers are mostly on their own for discerning the Safavid dynasty’s larger significance and context, and are rarely given interpretations to agree or disagree with. This was still a profitable read, but requires a more active approach on the reader’s part than most books.

Ian Kershaw – The Global Age: Europe 1950-2017 

Kershaw is best known as a historian of Nazi Germany, and the author of the definitive two-volume Hitler biography. More recently, he has turned his focus to modern Europe more generally. This book concludes a two-part series. The first, gloomier half is To Hell and Back: Europe 1914-1949; this volume is rather sunnier.

Major themes early in the book include the fall of the Iron Curtain and rapid nuclear armament, along with all the tension and unease those developments caused. I was previously unaware of the scale of post-war migration to escape socialism. East Germany lost about 2 million people to West Germany during the 1950s, with an average of 2,300-2,400 people escaping daily until the Berlin Wall was finished in 1961.

As the book goes on, the reader realizes how deep the scars of 20^th century’s first-half tumult run. The very reason for the formation of the European Community and its various iterations on up to the European Union was to prevent another world war. In line with thinkers from Montesquieu in the 18^th century on up to Cordell Hull in the 20^th, have argued, close trade and economic ties help to maintain peace. Economic integration will make war so costly that no country would dare attempt another round of Napoleonic conquest or, more to the point, a Third Reich.

This argument is deeply felt throughout the continent at a visceral level, something most American observers don’t see. The EU’s agricultural and regulatory policies have few defenders, but then those aren’t the EU’s raison d’etre. Understanding that dynamic is essential to understanding the Brexit debate and other debates about the EU’s future. It does not hinge on a socialism-vs.-markets debate. For most of the debate’s participants, it is instead about nationalism-vs.-cosmopolitanism, or more fundamentally, how best to prevent another World War II.

Even the Cold War was largely an echo of World War II. Most of the continent was overtaken by one of two forms of totalitarianism; communism just happened to be the one that lasted longer. In the post-war Stalin and Khrushchev years, the Soviet bloc was a feared nuclear enemy, requiring NATO and extensive U.S. involvement to keep it at bay.

But as time went on, Brezhnev-era political sclerosis took its toll while the more market-oriented West grew. The Soviet threat became gradually less scary and less stable. By the Gorbachev era, the thinking went from how to deal with nuclear fallout to how to deal with the political and economic fallout from communism’s coming collapse. An American reader might see the Europe-Russia relationship under Yeltsin as a little bit like the dynamic between the Griswold family and Uncle Eddie in the National Lampoon’s Vacation movies.

Kershaw is more of a political historian than a social one, so everyday life for ordinary European people is not the focus here. Music, fashion trends, and art are mostly cordoned off into separate short chapters throughout the book, roughly one per decade. If you want to know what it was like to live there during this period, go elsewhere. But Kershaw is excellent at identifying larger historical themes and seeing how they interact and play out. Kershaw is also a talented prose stylist; this book reads quickly and easily enough for the reader to forgive its 700-page length.

Kershaw also clearly lacks substantive background in economics. He shows this in his frequent use of the term “neo-liberal,” which has no coherent definition. It is nearly always used as a pejorative, though Kershaw’s usage ranges from neutral to mildly negative, further adding to the confusion. In discussing trade issues, Kershaw adheres to the balance of payments fallacy, which would flunk him out of a freshman introductory economics course.

He also does not grasp that John Maynard Keynes and Milton Friedman’s differing monetary policies share a common conception of the quantity theory of money. They part ways on the ought, not so much the is. In addition, Kershaw cites Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom as Friedman’s statement on monetary theory. That book contains just one chapter out of thirteen on monetary issues. Friedman’s 800-page Monetary History of the United States, coauthored with Anna Schwartz, was his definitive work, the leading cause of his Nobel Prize, and is hardly obscure.

So long as one takes Kershaw’s attempts at economic theory and policy analysis as seriously as they deserve, this is an excellent survey of a neglected area of history that is impacting everything from today’s Brexit debate to trade relations with the United States to how Europe will deal with the rise of China as a major power.